HostGator to SiteGround – My Web-Hosting Migration Experience

I believe it was in the last quarter of 2009 when I started using Hostgator as my hosting service. Since then I have purchased over 5 hosting packages from Hostgator and have hosted more than ten WordPress blogs with them.

Undoubtedly, Hostgator’s hosting quality is good. Lately, however, their customer support has started to disappoint me.

For the past year, I have wanted to move my sites away from Hostgator, and try a new web hosting company for my WordPress blog. In this post, I will share what I experienced when changing hosting companies. I have added few insights that may be helpful to you if you decide to change your host at some point.

No donuts For me: hosting renewal fees

Last month I received an email from Hostgator for a hosting renewal payment. I had only two days to make the payment, and this presented me with the dilemma of needing to decide whether to stay with Hostgator or move away from them.

Unlike the discounts offered when you sign up for a new account, there is no discount offered for hosting renewals. My 6-month hosting renewal with Hostgator cost me about $60, which is $10/month, and I did not want to pay that amount. So I decided to move away from Hostgator.

In this tutorial, I will share what I experienced when I moved five WordPress sites from Hostgator to SiteGround’s hosting service. I will also share a few important things I learned while making this move, and I will give you a glimpse into Siteground’s hosting service as well.

A few words about Siteground:

I had heard many great things about SiteGround, and looking at the technology they are offering for their shared hosting servers; I was quickly inspired to try their service. Once such bit of technology is Varnish Cache.

Varnish Cache is a web application accelerator which I had used in the past when I was hosting ShoutMeLoud on my private VPS (Virtual Private Server). Varnish Cache is one reason behind blazingly fast website loading and is among the reasons I wanted to try Siteground. Siteground is also a non-EIG hosting service, yet another reason for me to give their hosting service a try.

Moving my WordPress site from Hostgator to Siteground:

Once I felt confident that it was time to move away from Hostgator, I purchased Siteground hosting for two years at a 60% discounted price using this link. Initially, I considered buying it for one year, but I quickly realized that I would be paying way too much for the second year’s renewal.

Tip: If you want to save on web hosting, always purchase it for a 2-3 year term, because you will only be offered a discount on your first hosting bill. (You can read more about it here.)

Afte purchasing the hosting, I started looking for migration options. Siteground offers free website migration, which is quite useful for non-technical users. In my case, I wanted to migrate my WordPress blog myself, so I used the Duplicator plugin to start migrating the site.

Moving the first site took extra time since I was using the Duplicator plugin for the first time. After that, moving the remaining sites was quite easy.

The problem with moving sites, and help from Siteground’s hosting support:

I was tired after migrating four sites, and I asked Siteground support to move the last site from Hostgator to Siteground for me. I filled out the migration from inside my Siteground cPanel, and added all the login details:

After filling out the form, I suspected that it might take 2-3 days to finish the migration. To my surprise, I received a reply within 3 minutes.

I re-verified the login details, and I sent the new credentials for my Hostgator cPanel. Within 10 minutes I received a response from Siteground support stating as follows:

“As you may know our free website transfer promotion is for 1 website that is less than 1 GB of data. If you want us to proceed with the transfer you should decrease the size of your account with HostGator or you can pay an additional website transfer fee of 49.95 USD for this transfer.”

Since I had already migrated four sites, I had deleted the data of the migrated sites, and the size of my Hostgator hosting account was reduced to 3Gb which they gladly migrated over to their hosting.

So far I’m really happy with Siteground’s customer support, as they did an awesome job to ensure that my sites were properly migrated. I told them that my hosting was about to expire in 12 hours, and they migrated the main site to my Siteground hosting within 5 hours. Additionally, they took a complete backup of my existing sites on Hostgator, and saved it to my hosting account so that if Hostgator shuts down my account, I will still have access to my other sites’ backup.

Within five hours I had moved all five of my WordPress sites to Siteground hosting. Since I was using Cloudflare to manage my DNS, the Name server propagation happened instantly.

In conclusion.

I’m pretty happy with my decision to host my sites on Siteground. So far I have appreciated their customer support which typically replies within five minutes of creating a ticket. I also have the option of getting in touch with their friendly support team via live chat.

I use the word “friendly” because their support team speaks to a customer as though he is a friend, and they seem to care about all customer concerns whether they are related to Siteground’s hosting or to the customer’s sites which are hosted on their server.

Most hosting companies will not offer support for sites hosted on their server, but Siteground is an exception, and this is appreciated.

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A blog scientist by the mind and a passionate blogger by heart ❤️. Fountainhead of ShoutMeLoud (Award winning blog), speaker at various international forums.Life motto: Live while you can! Teach & inspire while you could & Smile while you have the teeth.

harsh sir, i am using godaddy hosting, if you have any knowledge about godaddy hosting, please suggest me which hosting will better than godaddy, because my hosting renewal will soon. thanks for sharing moving of site on hosting.

@Munesh I would recommend to pick between Siteground or Bluehost. Siteground is recommended in your case,as they offer free migration of your existing site. Buy the hosting for 2-3 years to get maximum discount

My website is receiving around 15K visits per day. And it is increasing day by day. And I am using A Small Orange Hosting. It works very well. I migrated from Bluehost to them and it has been very great experience

My website loads super fast now. They are cheaper and their support is like a Dream Come true. Whether its Monday or Sunday, 12 am or 12 pm. You will always find someone there for you.

I am using Cloud VPS Level 2 Plan of them and so far I recommend them to any body, Beginner, Intermediate or Professional.

@Anish Siteground is a Non EIG hosting company and there is a remarkable difference between Hostgator & Siteground. If I have to note down the major difference and advantages of Siteground over Hostgator, here are few of them: Siteground offers superior tech support. Your ticket will answered within 5 minutes (This is what my experience with them after creating almost 8 tickets) Their in-house technology is great and unlike EIG owned hosting companies, they don’t offer unlimited stuff. After all Unlimited hosting is nothing less than a cliche!

Great post. I decided to shift my website to SitGround after reading this post and am very happy with the decision. A small query, I am not able to update my domain name server settings for my domain that I purchased from HostGator. Can you please suggest how did you get that resolved.

SiteGuard team has asked me to do following: “In order to have the domain name resolve the content from our servers, you should point it to the Name Servers of your account with us”.

Hey Harsh I moved to site ground yesterday and I read your post now today. When I started to read the post I was like a bit nervous then what you would have been written as I move to site ground already and glad to here its amazing and I had 7 sites on hostgator they move all without any problems so far things are going good hope it will remain the same.

I’ve read all the site ground hosting posts of SML. I’ve already decided to go with that hosting provider for my blog. Yesterday, I spoke with the support team, they are kind and told that they will do the migration for free.

Currently, I’m using one.com, I don’t have any issues till now, but I can’t perform well. Thus I’ve decided to change the theme and hosting of my blog.

They are a great hosing when it comes to quality & customer support. Though, before you shift do tell them your current traffic & which of their plan will be right. Do keep a note of your growing traffic too.

I just open my new account with site ground, because I was paying a lot to host gator for my two accounts. It is second day today, my site is still not moved to site ground, I don’t have experience with them, just new, you think it takes this much time to move a site from one host to another or what?

@Jaswinder I believe this might be because of Weekend. Though one thing you can do to speed up the migration process is by speaking to their support on Live chat. You can also tweet them on Twitter @siteground which usually works all the time. Most of he companies give priority to complaints on Social Media to manage their brand image.

For migration, I use the updraft Plugin. Works better than others in my opinion. Previously I used Duplicator, which is ok, unless the site is rather large. If too big, say 5 gigs, it will crash with a timeout error. Updraft WILL NOT do that. You can find videos on youtube of how to use, though I should do one since many are not very good.

Back to Updraft, if you use for migrating it will recommend the premium version, though that’s not necessary. I’ve migrated many sites using the free version. It is a fairly quick process usually.

Hostgator support ranges from bad to worse I paid for hosting and took 4 days just to transfer the site to them. While one of my site is hosted at siteground and only took them about 5 hours to move the site.

Hi Harsh, I have a doubt…If I buy a domain with HostGator (the one that comes with the basic package) and then I decide to move to another hosting…does HG has the same policy as SiteGround about only using the domain with them??

@Laura With Hostgator you can use domain on other hosting as well. I was not aware of Siteground limit the use of domain only with their hosting. I will do more research on it & will add a post if that’s true.

I also moved my sites from Hostgator to Siteground. I am so much happier. Their tech support has been great. Hostgator could not help me with a basic issue and it was effecting one of my client relationships. Siteground did not have the issue. The only complaint I have with my change over is that Siteground does not automatically populate outlook or mail. I’ve had issues with it on all my client accounts. Other than that, no issues.

I’ve been hosting with SiteGround for 3+ years. I migrated customer sites from Godaddy, HostGator and others back then and have never looked back. When I talk to the friendly tech’s at SiteGround I am never dissapointed and always delighted. I had often worried about web support from people whose first language is not english. But those concerns are not an issue with SiteGround. Not even a little bit.

Last year, I’ve bought 3 years hosting package at hostgator but now, hostgator’s performance is not satisfying me. I want to transfer my hosting to siteground. But I have one confuse: Will hostgator transfer that money (of 2 remaining years) to siteground? I don’t wanna lose money. HELP!